“Almost every Lord is paranoiac. It’s a deeply embedded part of our culture, such as it is. Most of them don’t trust anybody, including themselves.”
Kickaha laughed, and he said, “Well, let’s go on into Paranoia Land.”
They began walking across the plain. They were as constantly watchful as birds, glancing up often at the sky, at the grass just ahead of them, and at the vista beyond their feet. The grass could conceal snakes or large crouching predators. Something dangerous could suddenly appear in the sky. But for the first hour, they saw only insects in the grass and herds of large four-tusked elephantlike and four-horned antelopelike beasts in the distance.
Then a black speck emerged from the green sky. It was behind them, but Anana saw it during one of her frequent glances behind her. After a few minutes, it came low enough for them to see a bird with a ravenlike silhouette. It got no lower then but continued in the same direction as they.
When they saw it circle now and then before resuming the same path, they suspected that it was following them.
“It could be one of those giant language-using ravens that Vannax made in his laboratory for spying and message-carrying when he was Lord of this world,” Kickaha said.
He added, “Looks more and more like Red Orc is watching us.”
“Or somebody is.”
“My money’s on Orc.”
He and Anana stopped to rest a while in the knee-high, blue-stalked, and crimson-tipped grass.
“I suppose it could be a machine disguised as a bird,” he said. “But if it’s a machine, it’s being controlled by a Lord. That doesn’t seem likely.”
“When did we ever come across anything but the unlikely?”
“Seems like it. But it’s not always so by any means.”
He was on his back, his hands behind his head, looking at the dark enigma in the sky. Anana was half lying down, leaning on one hand, her head tilted back to watch the bird or whatever it was.
“That figure eight the bird’s now making in the sky,” Kickaha said, “looks from here like it’s on its side. That reminds me of the symbol for infinity, the flattened figure eight on its side. One of the few things I remember from my freshman mathematics class in college. Which I never finished. College, I mean.”
“The Thoan symbol is a straight line with arrowheads at each end pointing outward,” she said. “If the line has a corkscrew shape, it’s the symbol for time.”
“I know.”
Visions of Earth slipped past in his mind like ghosts in coats of many colors. In 1946, he had been twenty-eight years old, a World War II veteran going to college on the G. I. Bill. Then he had been hurled into another universe, though not unwillingly. This was the Lord-created artificial universe that contained only the tiered planet, Alofmethbin.
This was, he had found, only one among thousands of universes made by the ancient Thoan, the humans who denied that they were human. Here was where he, Paul Janus Finnegan, the adventure-loving Hoosier, had become Kickaha the Trickster.
And, since coming to the World of Tiers, he had seldom not been fleeing his enemies or attacking them, always on the move except for some rare periods of R&R. During these relatively infrequent times, he had usually gotten married to the daughters of a tribal chief on his favorite level, the second, which he called the Ameridian level.
Or he had become involved with the wife or daughter of a baron on the third level, which he called the Dracheland level.
He had left a trail of women who grieved for him for a while before inevitably falling in love with another man. He had also left a trail of corpses. The debris, you might say, of Finnegan’s wake.
Not until 1970 did he return to Earth, and that was briefly. He had been born in A.D. 1918, which made him fifty-two or fifty-three Terrestrial years old now. But he was, thank whatever gods there be, only twenty-five in physiological age. If he’d stayed on Earth, what would he be there? Maybe he would have gotten a Ph.D. in anthropology and specialized in American Indian languages. But he would have had to be a teacher, too. Could he have endured the grind of study, the need to publish, the acadernic backbiting and throat-slitting, the innumerable weary conferences, the troubles with administrators who regarded teachers as a separate and definitely inferior species?
He might’ve gone to Alaska, where there was, in 1946, a sort of frontier, and he might have been a bush pilot. But that life would eventually have become tedious.
Perhaps by now he would own a motorcycle sales-and-repair shop in Terre Haute or Indianapolis. No, he couldn’t have stood the day-to-day routine, the worrying about paying bills, and the drabness.
Whatever he would have been on Earth, he would not have had the adventurous and exotic life, albeit hectic, he had experienced in the Thoan worlds.
The beautiful woman by his side-no, not a woman, a goddess, poetically speaking-was many thousands of years old. But the chemical “elixirs” of the Lords kept her at the physiological age of twenty-five.
She said, “We’re assuming that the raven is on an evil mission, bad for us. Perhaps it’s been sent to keep an eye on us, but by Wolff. He and Chryseis might have escaped from Red Orc’s prison and gotten to this world and now be in the palace. And they may have ordered the Eye to watch over us.’
“I know.”
She said, “It seems to me that we’ve been saying a lot of `I knows.’” “Maybe it’s time we took a long vacation from each other.”
“It wouldn’t do any good,” she said. Then, looking slyly sidewise at him, “I know.”
She burst into laughter, fell on him, and kissed him passionately.
Kickaha kissed her back as enthusiastically. But he was thinking that they might have been isolated from other human beings too long. They needed lots of company, not all the time, but often enough so that they did not rub against each other, as it were.
Her comments about “knowing” probably indicated a sadness born out of expectation based on hindsight. Because she had lived for many millennia, she had had far more experience than he. She had lived with hundreds of male Lords and had had a few children. Her longest time with a man had been about fifty years.
“That’s about the limit for a faithful couple, if you don’t age at all,” she had said. “The Lords don’t have the patience of you leblabbiy, a word I don’t mean in a derogatory sense. But we are different in some respects.”
“But many couples have lived together for thousands of years,” he had said.
“Not continuously.”
He was not tired or bored with her. Nor did she seem to be so with him. But being able to look backward on so many experiences, she was unable to keep from looking forward. She knew that a time would come when they must part. For a while, a long while, anyway.
He was not going to worry about that. When the time came to deal with it, he would. Just how, he did not know.
He rose, drank water from his deerskin canteen, and said, “If Wolff had sent that Eye, he would have told it to tell us that it was watching for us. And he would have told the Eye to give us directions to get to wherever he is. So it definitely was not sent by Wolff.”
He paused, then said, “Do you want to go now?” He knew better than to order her to leave with him. She resented any hint of bossiness by others. After all, though more empathetic and compassionate than most of her kind, she was a Lord.
“It’s time.”
They put their knapsacks and quivers on their backs and started walking again. He thought: On top of the many thousands-of-feet-high monolith ahead of us is, probably, the level called Atlantis. And on top of that is the monolith, much more narrow and less lofty than the others, on top of which is the palace Wolff built.
Three hours passed while they strode toward the forest. By now, they could see that another hour would bring them to its edge. Kickaha stepped up his pace. She did not ask why he was in such a hurry now. She knew that he did not like being on the plain for very long. It made him feel too exposed and vulner
able.
After about ten minutes, Kickaha broke the silence between them.
“I suspect that no one had come through that gate in the tomb until we did. There were no signs of previous entry. And, surely, the thing in the tomb or whoever put him there had set up many safeguards. Why, then, were we able to use the gate?”
“What do you think?”
He said, “There was some reason we and only we were allowed in. Emphasis on the `allowed.’ But why were we?”
“You don’t know that we were the first there. You don’t know that we were `allowed’ in.”
“True. But if someone else did get in, he or she didn’t trigger the raising of the cube and, I bet, the resurrection of the scaly man.” “You don’t know that for sure.”
“Yes, but I think that only someone with the Horn of Shambarimen could have penetrated that tomb.”
She smiled and said, “Perhaps. But the scaly man must’ve put himself in that tomb eons before the Horn was made. He couldn’t have known that the Horn would be made or that its frequencies would open the way to the tomb.”
“How do you know that he didn’t know it would be made? In his time, a device similar to the Horn could have been available.”
She laughed and said, “No one can predict the future. Besides, what significance did our entering there have?”
“It started a chain of events that’s only begun. As for predicting, maybe it’s not a matter of predeterminism or predicting. Maybe it’s a matter of probabilities. Don’t forget that that chamber contains devices surveying many universes. I think that when certain events are observed, the scaly man is raised from the tomb. After that, I don’t know.”
“You don’t know. That’s it.”
“Okay, you’re probably right!” he said. “But if I’m right, I expect you to apologize and kiss my foot, among other things, and be humble and obedient thereafter to the end of eternity, amen.”
“Your face is red! You’re angry!”
“You’re too skeptical, too blase, too jaded. And too almighty sure of yourself.”
“We’ll see. But if you’re wrong, you can do to me what I was supposed to do to you.”
They did not speak for some time afterward. While crossing the last few miles to the edge of the forest, detouring once to avoid a herd of giant bison, they looked back twice. The raven was still following them but was much lower.
“Definitely an Eye of the Lord,” Kickaha said.
She said, “I know,” laughed, and then said, “I’ve got to quit saying that.”
They entered the shade of the thousand-foot-high sequoialike trees. The forest floor was thick with dead leaves. That was strange, since there was no change of season on this planet. But when he saw a few leaves flutter down from the trees, he realized that it shed old leaves and replaced them with new ones. A few other plants on Alofmethbin did that.
The undergrowth was sparse, though here and there, thorny bushes forced the two to go around them. Many small, blue-eyed creatures that looked like furry and wingless owls watched them from the safety of the brambles.
Monkeys, birds, and flying and gliding mammals screamed, hooted, and chittered in the branches. But in the immediate area of the humans, silence fell, only to be broken after they had passed.
Once a weasel the size of a Rocky Mountain lion looked around the side of a tree trunk at them but did not charge them. The two humans knew that a predator was there before the weasel revealed itself. The clamor in the area ahead of them had ceased.
Kickaha and Anana had already strung their bows. There was no predicting what dangerous man or beast dwelt in this twilit but noisy place. They had also loosened the straps of their knife scabbards.
They had gone a mile when they came to a clearing about sixty feet wide. This had been made by two sequoias that had fallen together. That had been a long time ago, judging by the rottenness of the wood. Kickaha looked up in time to see the raven just before it settled down on a bench halfway down a tree next to the open ground. The big leaves of a parasitic plant hid it then.
“Okay,” Kickaha muttered. “No doubt of it now. It’s ahead of us but may not know it is. It may be waiting for us to come by here since we were walking in a more or less straight line. I don’t know how it’s kept its eye on us so far.”
Since the raven was the size of a bald eagle, it could not flit from branch to branch.
“Maybe it knows where we’re going,” Kickaha said.
“How could that be? We don’t know ourselves where we’re going except in a general direction. And the woods are thick here. It couldn’t have followed us. Oh, I see! It followed the silences falling around us.”
They withdrew a few feet into the shade. Then he whispered, “Let’s watch from here.”
Presently, just as he had expected, he saw the big, black bird spiral down and land on a branch projecting from one of the fallen and decaying behemoths. Then it glided to the ground, its wings half-outspread, and walked toward them. Kickaha thought that it had come to the ground to find out where they were. It would hide and listen for the two humans.
But it could, at the moment, neither see them nor, in the still air, smell them. Kickaha and Anana were lucky that they had spotted it before it saw them.
Kickaha placed a finger to his lips, then whispered very softly in Anana’s ear.
“It can see like a hawk and hear almost as well as a dog. Let’s move on. We won’t be quiet. It can follow us until we’re ready to catch it.”
“If it’s sent by a Lord, that might mean that a Lord is in Wolff’s palace.”
“If there is, we’ll be lucky to elude the traps there.”
“Lots of ifs.”
Kickaha pointed a finger at the huge, black bird and then touched his lips. Deliberately, he stepped on a dry branch. The loud crack made the raven whirl around and waddle swiftly to a hiding place behind a lowgrowing bush on the side of the clearing across from the two. No doubt, after they had passed it, it would return to the clearing and use it as a runway so it could take to the air again. But if it saw that the humans were walking slowly, it might just follow them on foot. Ravens, however, did not like to walk far.
Thinking that it had located them without being detected, it would be as smug as a raven could be. In this universe, as on most, smugness often caused a tumble into the dust.
“We must take it alive,” Kickaha said.
“I know.”
“For God’s sake!” he said in English. Then, seeing her smile slightly, he knew that she was just having fun with him.
They crossed the clearing slowly, looking left and right and, now and then, behind them. If they did not behave cautiously, the raven would know that they were pretending carelessness to deceive an observer.
Nor did they swing wide of the bush. Silently, they passed within a few feet of it. Kickaha looked at the bush but could not see the bird. Now, if he were so inclined, would be the time for him to break suddenly into a run. Anana would do so a half-second behind him, but she would head for the side of the bush opposite the one he would be racing for. The raven would flee, but it would not have time to take to its wings or to hide again.
Anana said nothing. She was waiting to see what Kickaha would do. He walked on by the bush and into the forest. He did not have to tell her that they were going to pretend they were not aware of the bird. Let the raven follow them. Eventually, they would find out why it was stalking them.
And then he almost halted. He grunted.
Anana noticed the break in stride and heard his suppressed exclamation. Instead of looking around and thus notifying whatever had startled him that she was aware of its presence, she looked straight ahead. She said quietly, “What is it?”
“I wish I knew,” he said. “I saw … off to the right … just a flash …-a something like a man but not human. Not quite, anyway. Maybe my mind’s playing tricks. But he, if it was male, looked like he was human. He was very big and very hairy for a human being. O
nly…”
She waited several seconds, then said, “Well?”
“His face, I don’t know. It was not quite human. There was something, uh, bearlike about it. I’ve been all over this planet and have never seen or heard of anything like it. On the other hand, this planet has more land area than Earth. So, I just never knew anybody who knew about it.”
She looked to the left, then to the right.
“I see nothing.”
He half-stepped out from behind a tree, then stepped back. “Angle casually over toward the tree.”
She went in the direction he had indicated by bending his head. She must have noticed that the arboreal animals in the branches five hundred feet above her had fallen silent. But, like him, she must have thought that it was their approach that had caused this.
They went approximately a hundred feet before he spoke.
“The one just ahead.”
It was one of the gigantic sequoialike plants. Its bark was as shiny as if thousands of pieces of mica were embedded in it.
“I hope there’s only one of him,” he said.
He lifted his bow with an arrow and started to go around on the left side of the enormous trunk. She headed toward the right side. Anybody still on the back side of the tree would be caught between them.
When they came around the trunk, they saw only each other. Though the thing Kickaha had glimpsed did not look as if it had claws, he looked upward along the bole. No creature clung to it, and not even a squirrel could have gotten to the branches this fast. Anana had stepped back so she could see more of the other side of the trunk. The tree was so huge, however, that a section of it was invisible to both of them. After telling Anana to stay where she was but to keep looking upward, he ran around the tree. At the same time, he kept his gaze on the upper reaches of the bole. But he saw no living creature.
When he returned to Anana, he said, “It was too heavy to climb up the trunk even if it’d had claws a foot long. I had to make sure, though.”
She pointed at the thick piles of dead leaves on the ground. He was already looking at them. They were scattered in so many directions that he could not tell if the creature had been coming to or going from the tree.
More Than Fire Page 4
